Elaborate


Within the e5 instructional model, the fourth stage is elaborate.

The Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) describes the stage of elaborate as
  • The teacher engages students in dialogue, continuously extending and refining students’ understanding
  • They support students to identify and define relationships between concepts and to generate principles or rules
  • The teacher selects contexts from familiar to unfamiliar, which progressively build the students’ ability to transfer and generalise their learning
  • The teacher supports students to create and test hypotheses and to make and justify decisions
  • They monitor student understanding, providing explicit feedback, and adjusting instruction accordingly

When planning activities for year 5/6 students, it is important that the activity provides a clear outline of expected outcomes that the students must reach, whilst remaining open-ended so that students are encouraged to use higher order thinking process.

Using Primary Pad for 'Elaborate' activities in the classroom.

As a teacher it is increasingly important to make tasks appealing to students, and what better way to do so than to make it interactive and fun, incorporating technology into lessons.
It is a word-processor style online document that allows students and teachers to collaboratively add to and edit information text live.
Some of the benefits of using Primary pad are:
  • It is free
  • It doesn’t require users to sign up or log-in
  • It is very easy to use
  • Has a wide range of uses for all ages and curriculum areas
  • Allows for collaboration across the class
  • Is secure – only people with the unique URL can enter a room
  • It is ad-free
  • It also provides an authentic opportunities to discuss netiquette and cyber safety issues

Black Saturday video activity preparation

Instructions:
Group size: 3-4 students
Task: Using a primary-pad document, students in a group work collaboratively to gather, analyse, and refine information gathered about The Black Saturday bushfire. Students can also use this space to organise their ideas for the presentation and to monitor progress of presentation.
Each group will be given access to their own primary-pad page through a link provided to each student, this will allow them to continuously return to, build on and refine the knowledge bank and develop their finial plan before beginning the filming stage in the next assessment.

As long as students have access to the internet, whether it be at school, home, local library, they can access their group page, which is providing them with a unique opportunity that is hard to recreate using other normal means of group work.

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Primary pad activity for students

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